Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Game design, like many creative pursuits, often involves working towards a goal that is hard to quantify or describe. That being said, I've certainly had times where I've thought I had an excellent idea for a mechanism or theme, and I was able to sketch out most of the concepts before I even started making the first prototype. I knew exactly what I wanted the game to be, the experience the players would have, and the sorts of decisions they would encounter along the way.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is sometimes the games we think that we completely understand that end up being our most unexpected creations. Take for example the game that I mentioned in my last post, which was merely a mechanism at the time. I thought that it would be a fairly standard Eurostyle game, where any theme would suffice as a backdrop for its mechanical underpinnings. A game that would make Stefan Feld proud (well, we can all hope!).

One week, prototype and playtest later, the game has completely changed. But not in the sense that it had a bad playtest, or that the mechanism I had envisioned completely missed the mark. In fact, the playtest went fairly well as first playtests go, and certainly the high point for me was the fact that the machine I had placed in the game did give the players some agonising and interesting moments (even if there were other problems). It was rather that I now view the game in a different light, and have some similarly differing goals for it.

Whereas previously theme had taken a backseat in my design choices, some random thread of thought I had while making the first prototype simply read 'Vikings'. Don't ask me why or how, but within a few hours of this thought, I had a complete prototype, replete with Viking pieces scavenged from Walhalla and a heptagonal player board:

From a game that previously revolved about the crucial decision as to where to make your next bid for an action, I now see a game that tells a whole story for the players, as they lead the members of their clan to glorious battle in this world and the next, attempting the appease their gods so they might live for eternity in the Hall of the Gods, Valhalla. It even has got to the point where today I made a trip to the local library to devour more details to include in the game. Previously generic temples are now rune-covered stones, and your 'meeples' have become mighty Viking warriors and wise priests.

The theme now not only interests me, but is inspiring me in the direction I take the game's mechanics, crafting an arc that I couldn't have imagined before. This in turn helps me better define who the players are in the game and why they are doing what they are doing (something I had been having problems with prior to this revelation). I'm not going to argue that this as a whole is a particularly novel experience, but I am glad to have had it all the same. I actually think it will change the way I approach the early stages of game design in the future - having a strong theme from the beginning can offer so much inertia to a design to really help you push through those first few major iterations while maintaining a clear vision of what the game is actually about.

I never cease to be amazed by the crazy journeys that you take with your creations. No matter how exciting or strange your starting vision is, you simply have no idea where you'll end up. A scenic route indeed.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

I'm beginning the work on a new design of mine (so new that it doesn't have much of an identity yet, let alone a name), and as is increasingly customary for my design process, it has begun with an idea for an interesting mechanic.

The main concept is one where players will bid a certain number of workers towards a number of available actions, which each turn are supplemented by two bonuses (the bonuses themselves rotate around the actions after every turn). Players get to carry out all actions that they bid for, with the strength or quality of that action determined by the number of workers they bid. In addition, winning a particular action (by having bid the most workers) allows you first choice of one of the bonuses, with the player in second getting the other.

No matter how novel or interesting this mechanic turns out to be, I am becoming increasingly more interested in how the texture of a game is designed, rather than its engine. You see, I am a very mechanical type of designer (it is not surprise that I am so drawn to Stefan Feld's games), but I tend to struggle in designing the texture of the game that is to surround the many mechanics that I come up with.

I might be using words a little freely here, but for me the texture of a game refers to what the players are actually doing, rather than the choices that lead them to do these things (or in fact, the way by which the players make these choices). It's all very well to present players with a gripping mechanism that constrains what choices they can make on a turn, but it is for nought if the 'what' of the game cannot live up to the 'how'.

Both mechanics and texture are central parts of any gaming experience, and in my opinion far too much emphasis and critique is placed on the former. For example, many laud Feld's Castles of Burgundy for its innovative dice mechanism, but I am more and more impressed with the feel of playing the game - the variety of the little tiles that you use to create you own dominion throughout the game, and how this looks as it proceeds.

The take away message for me is that each part of a design must hold up on its own to contribute to a truly great game. A designer needs to be mindful both of the details and the whole, and they require different skills in their creation. Let's see if I can follow my own advice as this fledgling game develops!

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

This past weekend saw me traipsing down to London for the monthly meetup group Playtest. Organised by the ever capable Rob Harris, this is a group of local (and this month, international) board and card game designers who get together at a pub to playtest each others games and provide ever-valuable feedback.

Being able to attend groups such as these can be as terrifying as it is rewarding, as getting relative strangers (although after attending this group for over a year, the other members are far from this now!) to playtest and offer critique of your games allows you to get feedback that you could never get from your close circle of friends and regular playtesters, but that feedback is also hard to anticipate or expect.

This particular month I brought along the first prototype of a game, Trinity, that is a new collaboration between Brett Gilbert and myself. Trying to follow my own advice (see the last post) we had spent the last month exploring what the game should be, what our goals were for the game, and the particular mechanics that we could use. Brett and I think about games in quite different ways, and having discussions like these before we even make the first prototype can be a productive way to explore the design space available to us.

In the end, we made the prototype in parts - Brett took care of the dice and board (as his talent for graphic design far exceeds mine), and I created the content for the many cards that were part of this prototype. The game is a sort of choose your own adventure, exploring, questing kind of game - a genre that is actually fairly foreign to both of us (and this aspect of designing games outside your comfort zone may well be the topic of a future post).

Needless to say, we finally got it to the table, and had three other willing playtesters to help us discover whether there was trash or treasure within the game. After an hour and a half of playing, with some laughter, a lot of reading and some confusion, we had found some small specks of gold, but they seemed to be lost in a morass of the gaming equivalent of sludge.

There were many things wrong with the game, and many of the points raised by the other playtesters resonated with my own fears and concerns for the game, that our aim of trying to take a narrative, thematic experience and to pair this with strong, clear and interactive mechanics, might be trying to fulfil diametrically opposed goals.

Suffice to say, I came away from this seemingly 'bad' playtest experience feeling a bit despondant, and almost wanting to shelve the project for some time. Thankfully, Brett was there to rescue me from my despair, and on the train journey back to Cambridge we proceeded to pick apart the game and see what we could make of it.

The surprising thing was, as a result of this conversation, we had even more inspiration for the game, and a good shot of enthusiasm to take it in a new direction for our next prototype. The very next day we met over lunch, and we now have the makings of a new game that has risen from the ashes of the previous one, combining the best parts of the former with some new elements.

Designers sometimes say that a playtest where everything goes wrong is valuable because it clearly shows you what works and what doesn't work in your game, much more than when everything is going smoothly. I would agree with this. But I want to add something more. A seemingly 'bad' playtest can be even more important at the very beginning of game design, because it truly allows you to shake off the shackles of the parts of the design that were weighing you down because you thought they were necessary or central to the experience you were trying to create. A bad playtest frees you to open yourself up to making a truly new and creative game, and to not be constrained by your initial ideas.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

A common piece of advice given to new designers is that of 'prototype early, prototype often'. The reasoning behind such advice is that the best way to test new ideas, to separate the wheat from the chaff, is to actually turn these ideas into physical form and play them. The harsh light of reality is shed onto these ideas that have been in your head for weeks, and only the best ones make it through. More over, prototyping as soon as possible allows a designer to judge quickly which ideas are worth spending more time on, and which ones simply do not work.

As a relatively new designer, I must say that I'm lucky in that I've never had too much of a problem with following this advice. In fact, at our weekly playtesting sessions I became somewhat known for appearing every week with a new prototype, some new and some iterations of an existing design. The best example of this I can think of was with a design I was working on last year for AEG's new Tempest setting.

I was desperately trying to make a game that I imagined fitted the different operations of the world's guilds - with the different actions in the different parts of the city reflecting the characters and aims of these organisations. To tie everything together, I was trying to find a way to have players use family members to complete these tasks, and to have these different agents gain experience and skills in line with they way they interacted with the world around them.

Looking back, it was an ambitious design, although at the time I don't think I appreciated this. I wasn't short of ideas, and I made numerous prototypes. These were duly taken along to our weekly playtesting session, where they always fell short in one way or another. Unfortunately, they seemed to fail (at least to me) not in ways that made subsequent iterations obvious, and so I would head back to the drawing board and overhaul the game. The next week I would show up with another, seemingly brand new prototype, and the cycle would continue. After two months of this, I was throughly sick of making prototypes that kept failing, and I haven't touched the game since.

Trying to understand what might have gone wrong in this whole process, I realised that I might have actually been doing myself a disservice in the way I went about this design. I'm not saying that this applies to everyone (or even a majority of designers) but what I think I needed to do was actually prototype less.

I'm come to think that spending an extra one or two weeks thinking about a game, the entire system that you are designing and how the different elements interact with each other, can be truly invaluable when it comes to producing a new prototype and playtesting it. Often, I would rush the prototyping process, telling myself that it was more important that I had a new prototype rather than making sure I had completely thought about every aspect of the game. Of course, a balance has to be struck between these two aims (and sometimes understanding everything about a design is impossible before a prototype is made!), but I certainly was on the extreme end of the scale.

My day job is as a chemist, and now I try to apply the values of experimentation to my process of designing games. Playtesting has much in common with experimenting, and prototyping with that of designing the experiment in the first place. The value of the experiment, and the conclusions that can be reached as a result, depend on making sure you design the experiment to ask the right questions. As it is with game design: the more time you spend thinking about what you want to get out of playtesting, the more valuable it will be. Far better than blindly making prototype after prototype without even knowing what questions you are asking of your players.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

If you were to scroll down to the previous entry in this blog, you would see that it was written over a year and a half ago, so I still have some way to go getting used to this blogging business (obviously).

But this morning I got inspired. Inspired to start anew, and to try and contribute to the wealth of excellent board game design content (and more generally, game design) I enjoy reading every day. This reboot post is going to contain two main strands of thought - an introduction to the crazy plan which I hope to follow for the next 8 months or so, and a shout out to some of the people who actually inspired me in the first place. Of course, this is not the first time that someone has wrote plans in the ink of the internet hoping to stick to them...but I may as well try.

The InspirationStefan Feld
If you're an avid fan of a certain German board game designer like me, you would have noticed that this is going to be a very good year for us. In the past two weeks, we have been lucky enough to hear the announcements and previews for not one, but four (!) new games from Feld. The first two, Bora Bora from Alea Spiele and Rialto from Pegasus Spiele, are scheduled to be released in the next month or so, with Brugge from Hans im Gluck and Amerigo from Queen coming later in the year.

As both a gamer and a designer I am constantly amazed by Feld's games, especially the way in which he is able to construct the always varied and ingenious engines at the heart of the design. I think this is what truly makes a Feld game tick; as a gamer you are constantly both constrained and invited by the system to make difficult decisions on both a broadly strategic and tactical level. Every game presents with a new system for you to learn and master - getting to terms with its parameters and their influence upon your eventual performance is part of the path you take as you play the games over and over again.

As a designer I am also very impressed not only by the creativeness in coming up with these many varied mechanisms, but also for Feld's way of never trying to add too much to his games - to be able to create a game world that is just the right size for his chosen engine to function. Reoccurring features such as clearly defined game lengths and a focus on designing systems rather than content help to achieve this goal.

How does this all relate to my plan? I think I just want to try and think a bit more like Stefan when I am designing if possible. In particular - I hope to focus on designing games with clear boundaries that focus on systems and engines to create the game experience. I think I often get caught falling down a rabbit hole, turning a simple feature into a deck of 30 unique cards that in turn require another 3 mechanisms in the game to interact with. This in turn makes the early design process muddled and longer, and you can't get a good look at the heart of the game you are trying to make.

Brett Gilbert

Brett is a British board game designer and editor, who designed the excellent game Divinare published by Asmodee, and who writes a similarly excellent game design blog. I had the good fortune to first meet Brett at Essen in 2011, when I had just moved to the UK, and had the even greater fortune that we both lived in Cambridge. Shortly after we first met we started meeting in a pub once a week to bandy about some game design ideas, and now over a year later we have weekly playtesting sessions that have sometimes recorded a double digit game designer attendance!

Brett relates to all of this in two main ways - firstly he is an excellent sounding board for all things game design, having an excellent grasp of how a player will interact and create the gaming experience for themselves based on what you present to them. I most certainly wouldn't have been able to design the games I have over the past year without his help and advice. In fact, last year we even finished our first game design collaboration (an experience which I will endeavour to expand on in a future post) which has now been submitted to several publishers, and this last month we have begun a new project together.

Secondly, his writing and analysis with regards to design and games on his blog is an exemplar for the amazing resources that budding game designers such as myself have access to on the internet. I can't hope to write as well as Brett, and nor will this blog have the same aims as his, but I do hope that through my writing I can add to the veritable wealth of game design discourse.

Daniel Solis

I have never met Daniel unfortunately, and my knowledge of him is only through Twitter and his blog. If it weren't for some videos of him on the internet I might even suspect that he is fact a robot in disguise for the mere reason that I cannot fathom how one man comes up with and explores so many new game design ideas, themes and mechanics every week. The fact that he is generous enough to share this varied and interesting thoughts with us all through his writing only adds to his awesomeness.

The main inspiration I've gained from Daniel (without him even knowing it) is that I want to try and be as open with my ideas as possible, and I hope this blog can be a vehicle in some ways for this openess. Too often I read posts from new designers who are scared that other people will steal their ideas, and only give out the vaguest of details while simultaneously asking for advice from the community.

I want to see what happens when you go the other way, when you try to share your ideas and problems as intimately as possible, in as close as a way to I experience them myself. The small parts of the board game design community I have come into contact with, mainly in the UK, have underlined the fact that for the most part the people in this small industry are exceptionally generous in the advice and support of each other, and it is a community that I want to become more involved with.

The Crazy PlanGame Design
I want to complete four new game designs by October this year, in order to take them with me to Essen in the hopes of presenting them to publishers. Thankfully, I'm not starting entirely from scratch at this point, with three games in their early Alpha stage (and some thoughts for the fourth). I want to challenge myself to stick with these first three ideas and finish them, as I think they have made it through that initial period where it is still possible that they are complete rubbish.

This Blog

Linking into my game design goal is a goal for this blog to document as much of that experience as possible, and to see if it can act as fuel for some discussions and ideas for the rest of the game design community. I also want this to be a diary of sorts that aspiring game designers can look at to get some idea of the real nitty gritty that goes into the process of designing a game. Therefore not every post is going to be like this (and by that I mean long and moderately well thought out), but I hope to update this blog at least every other day (in the vain hope that this means I will actually do some designing at roughly the same frequency).

So that's it. Let's hope this rebirth flames brighter and for longer that any previous incarnation!